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Antibiotics an alternative to surgery for appendicitis

Antibiotics successfully treated the majority of cases of uncomplicated acute appendicitis, where the appendix is inflamed but hasn’t burst or developed stones or infected pockets, researchers report June 16 in JAMA.

For more than 100 years, the standard treatment for appendicitis has been to surgically remove the appendix, a cigarette-sized pouch near the start of the large intestine. In the new trial, researchers randomly assigned 530 appendicitis patients to be treated with either surgery or antibiotics.

As expected, surgery successfully resolved 99 percent of appendicitis cases. But antibiotic treatment could be a first line of defense: Almost 75 percent of patients who got antibiotics were able to avoid surgery in the year following treatment.